Buy Buy Buy — July 6, 2005

Believe it or not, I just went through a day of deep consideration over whether to add the link to the BBS Documentary website that’s now on the left side of this weblog’s page. I consider it advertising and I don’t like advertising, no matter what twisted set of justifications I can throw on you.

Which I’m about to do.

The current state of thinking I have is that this weblog gets a sizeable amount of sites that don’t overlap with the documentary, and this weblog was basically created to discuss the documentary, so I might as well have a link to what I’m talking about, in a way that makes sense. Additionally, the documentary is creative commons licensed, which means people are able to download it as well as purchase it, so I’m not really forcing a product down their throats.

Finally, and I guess this is the most important thing, I need to maximize people knowing about this project because otherwise I’ve kind of wasted 4 years of my life making it just to have it reach a subset of people it could be reaching. That would be a real shame, especially when I’m at the Lafayette Home for Digital Historians and I’m yelling at the TV about how I never got to go to Amsterdam.

The more the documentary sells, the more chance there is of me making more. And along that line, let me let slip that I am in pre-production for two more documentaries. I spend about six months doing research, and who knows how long filming, but I’m in fact working on them. No doubt more details will come out over time, but I don’t want to deflect from the BBS Documentary, which has a long way to go in terms of both sales and released additional materials. But yes, selling tons of these things would convince my family that the next little projects would be worth doing. Otherwise, I’m sticking to websites.

So there. A big hullaballo over a clickable jpeg. Who says obsession always works in my favor?

I hate adverts on web pages, but I think you should have a big, obvious, link. In fact, I almost missed it, make it bigger 😉
Seriously though, you put time effort and money into making something for us, jo/anna public. You deserve something back.